Gary Bretcher writes :

 

 

 

The new big thing on the web is all these sites with names like “I Hate France,” with supposed datelines of French military history, supposedly proving how the French are total cowards. If you want to see a sample of this dumbass Frog bashing, try this:

http://www.****************.com/text/france.html

Well, I’m going to tell you guys something you probably don’t want to hear: these sites are total bullshit, the notion that the French are cowards is total bullshit, and anybody who knows anything about European military history knows damn well that over the past thousand years, the French have the most glorious military history in Europe, maybe the world.

 

Before you send me more of those death threats, let me finish. I hate Chirac too, and his disco foreign minister with the blow-dry ‘do and the snotty smile. But there are two things I hate more than I hate the French: ignorant fake war buffs, and people who are ungrateful. And when an American mouths off about French military history, he’s not just being ignorant, he’s being ungrateful.

 

I was raised to think ungrateful people were trash.

When I say ungrateful, I’m talking about the American Revolution. If you’re a true American patriot, then this is the war that matters. Hell, most of you probably couldn’t name three major battles from it, but try going back to when you read Johnny Tremaine in fourth grade and you might recall a little place called Yorktown, Virginia, where we bottled up Cornwallis’s army, forced the Brits’ surrender and pretty much won the war.

 

Well, news flash: “we” didn’t win that battle, any more than the Northern Alliance conquered the Taliban. The French army and navy won Yorktown for us.

 

Americans didn’t have the materiel or the training to mount a combined operation like that, with naval blockade and land siege. It was the French artillery forces and military engineers who ran the siege, and at sea it was a French admiral, de Grasse, who kicked the shit out of the British navy when they tried to break the siege.

 

Long before that, in fact as soon as we showed the Brits at Saratoga that we could win once in a while, they started pouring in huge shipments of everything from cannon to uniforms. We’d never have got near Yorktown if it wasn’t for massive French aid.

 

So how come you bastards don’t mention Yorktown in your cheap webpages? I’ll tell you why: because you’re too ignorant to know about it and too dishonest to mention it if you did. The thing that gets to me is why Americans hate the French so much when they only did us good and never did us any harm. Like, why not hate the Brits?

They’re the ones who killed thousands of Americans in the Revolution, and thirty years later they came back and attacked us again. That time around they managed to burn Washington DC to the ground while they were at it. How come you web jerks never mention that?

Sure, the easy answer is because the Brits are with us now, and the French aren’t. But being a war buff means knowing your history and respecting it.

 

Well, so much for ungrateful. Now let’s talk about ignorant. And that’s what you are if you think the French can’t fight: just plain ignorant. Appreciation of the French martial spirit is just about the most basic way you can distinguish real war nerds from fake little teachers’pets.

 

 

Let’s take the toughest case first: the German invasion, 1940, when the French Army supposedly disgraced itself against the Wehrmacht. This is the only real evidence you’ll find to call the French cowards, and the more you know about it, the less it proves. Yeah, the French were scared of Hitler. Who wasn’t?

 

Chamberlain, the British prime minister, all but licked the Fuhrer’s

goosesteppers, basically let him have all of Central Europe, because Britain was terrified of war with Germany. Hell, Stalin signed a sweetheart deal with Hitler out of sheer terror, and Stalin wasn’t a man who scared easy. The French were scared, all right. But they had reason to be. For starters, they’d barely begun to recover from their last little scrap with the Germans: a little squabble you might’ve heard of, called WW I.

 

WW I was the worst war in history to be a soldier in. WW II was worse if you were a civilian, but the trenches of WW I were five years of Hell like General Sherman never dreamed of. At the end of it a big chunk of northern France looked like the surface of the moon, only bloodier, nothing but craters and rats and entrails.

 

Verdun. Just that name was enough to make Frenchmen and Germans, the few who survived it, wake up yelling for years afterward. The French lost 1.5 million men out of a total population of 40 million fighting the Germans from 1914-1918.

lot of those guys died charging German machine-gun nests with bayonets. I’d really like to see one of you office smartasses joke about “surrender monkeys” with a French soldier, 1914 vintage. You’d piss your dockers.

 

******

 

When the sequel war came, the French relied on their frontier fortifications and used their tanks (which were better than the Germans’, one on one) defensively. The Germans had a newer, better offensive strategy. So they won. And the French

surrendered. Which was damn sensible of them.

 

This was the WEHRMACHT. In two years, they conquered all of Western Europe and lost only 30,000 troops in the process. That’s less than the casualties of Gettysburg. You get the picture? Nobody, no army on earth, could’ve held off the Germans under the conditions that the French faced them. The French lost because they had a long land border with Germany. The English survived because they had

the English Channel between them and the Wehrmacht. When the English Army faced the Wermacht at Dunkirk, well, thanks to spin the tuck-tail-and-flee result got turned into some heroic tale of a brilliant British retreat. The fact is, even the Brits behaved like cowards in the face of the Wermacht, abandoning the French. It’s that simple.

Here’s a quick sampler of some of my favorite French victories, like an antidote to those ignorant websites.

 

We’ll start way back and move up to the 20th century.

 

Tours, 732 AD: The Muslims had already taken Spain and were well on their way to taking the rest of Europe. The only power with a chance of stopping them was the French army under Charles “the Hammer” Martel, King of the Franks (French), who answered to the really cool nickname “the Hammer of God.” It was the French who

saved the continent’s ass. All the smart money was on the Muslims: there were 60,000 of them, crazy Jihadis whose cavalry was faster and deadlier than any in Europe. The French army was heavily outnumbered and had no cavalry. Fighting in phalanxes, they held against dozens of cavalry charges and after at least two days of hand-to-hand combat, finally managed to hack their way to the Muslim center and kill their commander. The Muslims retreated to Spain, and Europe

developed as an independent civilization.

 

 

Orleans, May 1429: Joan of Arc: is she the most insanely cool military commander in history or what? This French peasant girl gets instructions from her favorite saints to help out the French against the English invaders. She goes to the King (well, the Dauphin, but close enough) and tells him to give her the army and she’ll take it from there. And somehow she convinces him. She takes the army, which has lost every battle it’s been in lately, to Orleans, which is under English siege. Now Joan is a nice girl, so she tries to settle things peaceably.

She explains in a letter to the enemy commanders that everything can still be cool, “…provided you give up France…and go back to your own countries, for God’s sake. And if you do not, wait for the Maid, who will visit you briefly to your great sorrow.” The next day she put on armor, mounted a charger, and prepared to lead the attack on the besiegers’ fortifications. She ordered the gates opened, but the Mayor refused until Joan explained that she, personally, would cut off his head. The gates went up, the French sallied out, and Joan led the first

successful attack they’d made in years. The English strongpoints were taken, the siege was broken, and Joan’s career in the cow-milking trade was over.

 

 

Braddock’s Defeat (aka Battle of Monongahela) July 1755: Next time you’re driving through the Ohio Valley, remember you’re passing near the site of a great French victory over an Anglo-American force twice its size. General Edward Braddock marched west from Virginia with 1,500 men—a very large army in 18th-c. America. His orders were to seize French land and forts in the Valley—your basic undeclared land-grab invasion. The French joined the local tribes to resist, and

then set up a classic ambush. It was a slaughter. More than half of Braddock’s force—880 men—were killed or wounded. The only Anglo officer to escape unhurt was this guy called George Washington, and even he had two horses shot out from under him. After a few minutes of non-stop fire from French and Indians hidden in the woods, Braddock’s command came apart like something out of Nam, post-Tet.

Braddock was hit and wounded, but none of his troops would risk getting shot to rescue him.

 

 

Austerlitz, Dec. 1805: You always hear about Austerlitz as “Napoleon’s Greatest Victory,” like the little guy personally went out and wiped out the combined Russian and Austrian armies. The fact is, ever since the Revolution in 1789, French armies had been kicking ass against everybody. They were free citizens fighting against scared peasant and degenerate mercenaries, and it was no contest. At Austerlitz, 65,000 French troops took on 90,000 Russians and Austrians and destroyed them. Absolutely annihilated them. The French lost only 8,000, compared to 29,000 of the enemy. The tactics Bonaparte used were very risky, and would only have worked with superb troops: he encouraged the enemy to attack a weak line, then brought up reinforcements who’d been held out of sight. That kind of tactical plan takes iron discipline and perfect timing—and the French had it.

 

 

Jena, Oct. 1806: just a quick reminder for anybody who thinks the Germans always beat the French. Napoleon takes on the Prussian army and destroys it. 27,000 Prussian casualties vs. 5,000 French. Prussian army routed, pursued for miles by French cavalry.

 

You eXile (http://www.exile.ru) guys might want to remember that the French under Napoleon are still the only army ever to have taken all of continental Europe, from Moscow to Madrid. I could keep listing French victories till I had a book. In fact, it’s not a bad idea. A nice big hardback, so you could take it to the assholes running all the anti-French-military sites and bash their heads in with it.

Gawddamn thats alot of shit, I doubt anyone is gonna read that unless they are really bored.

only reason germans were sucsesful with panzers is because of blitzcrege

only reason germans were sucsesful with panzers is because of blitzcrege

 

Blitzkrieg*

 

Panzers and the Tigers were practically invincible, there only real weakness was there asses.

 

Ask Bud he was in WW2.

France is the shittiest country ever, they're pansy shiteating cowards.

Back in the Armenian Genocide years ~1900 i don't remember the exact dates the French military was hired to guard villages of Armenia, when they heard the ragheads were going to attack that night, they fled back to their shithole France and those villages were razed. Now this very day their frogfucking country is being overrun and destroyed by muslim immigrants, the karma serves the fuckers right.

I read it. Owned indeed.

 

I always thought the French bashing was rather lame. Cool find. Can you put a link to where you read it so I can link my friends?

i read it

you might want to change the title of the thread to something more interesting

I doubt they're gonna care about this snog, people hate canada since they hate france and canada is 1/13th french

Canada had a real army in WWI, too, but nobody cares

interesting though

Jedi Pimp']a topic I'm sure you're all too familiar with.

 

u free tonite jedi?:cry:

Jedi Pimp']a topic I'm sure you're all too familiar with.

 

$5 And ill show u some moves that'll make u cream like a cows udders

vagina go paintballing

Blitzkrieg*

 

Panzers and the Tigers were practically invincible, there only real weakness was there asses.

 

Ask Bud he was in WW2.

 

 

I'm not THAT fucking old....and I wouldn't know a panzer from a tiger, honestly :)

 

unless you're talking the big black sleek kitties and the bigger nasty striped ones...then I could point out the differences as well as ANY third grader at the zoo!

i didn't read, but once someone linked me to one of my movies on ****************, that made my day.

 

this did not, i don't feel like reading that much shit at 12:00 am christmas eve, thanks.

Techno_Warrior']France is the shittiest country ever, they're pansy shiteating cowards.

Wow, that certainly killed any qualms about ignorance.

 

Ever hear of World War I? France kicked fucking ass in that war, and it wouldn't have been won had it not been for them, and needless to say, our democracy would not be intact.

Yes...unfortunately, during our War for Independance, France was not the same country it is today...it was still a monarchy...they became a republic after we did.

 

Imperial monarchies do tend to have decent armies (even if half the army is made up of merc foreigners, like France's was)...they NEED them, in order to pacify any uprisings in their colonies <grin>

 

 

 

None of this changes the fact that it wasn't the French military, per se, that was any credit to their country during WWI OR WWII...both times, the French government was ineffectual, at best, and the troops who remained loyal to the government were thrown away uselessly, or surrendered with the rest of the government (sometimes both), depending on which war you refer to. It was the troops who formed into the underground, the resistance, and various other geurilla organizations, that were so much help in both world wars.

 

I will give the French one thing, though....their colonial experiences in Indonesia and Africa gave the veteran troops a strong grounding in and respect for some down and dirty, nasty ass, geurilla tactics...Had their government not hamstrung their own military in both world wars, their "official" conduct could have been far more valuable than is currently admitted...and they could claim credit for such behavior, rather than having small groups of loosely organized "resistance fighters" credited with some of the bravery and ability that was demonstrated.

because the Brits are with us now, and the French aren’t

 

Didnt we give bombs and shit to sudam? how come we dont respect him? remember the past

Well...when we gave Saddam the bombs and shit, he was using them on Iran.

 

How could we know he was going to do the "drop two, store one" routine, then turn around and attack an allied country?

 

Ok, in retrospect, it was stupid...but it made sense at the time...lol.

The point is you look at the past then we should respect him.

Why? Because 20 years ago he was pissed off at the same country we were?

 

If that were the case, we'd have to respect the Chinese from about 1945 until the collapse of the Soviet Union...they harrassed the russkies more than we EVER did...but we were fighting chinese almost as much as koreans during the korean conflict, and they supplied arms and training all through 'Nam to the VC and NVA...not to mention their backing of the Khemer Rouge(sp?) and several other "revolutions" in the far east.

 

Oh...and for the French supporters mentioning their aid to us during our revolution...you ARE aware they did it because they were at war with England themselves at the time (over colonial properties, I believe), and aiding us in keeping another front open made it easier for them to win in other arenas? (Also, at the time, the "first world" was France, England, Spain, Portugal, and the Dutch empire...we ARE talking about the days when whoever had the most boats was the richest and most "civilized", after all)...and on top of that, we ran the French off handily, all by ourselves, not even 50 years later (when we were STILL a second-class country, still often referred to as "the American colonies" in Europe) while simultaneously having a war with the Spanish colonists, warring with four different major Amerind tribes, AND expanding our western boundaries (it was called "the French and Indian War", for those of you who don't know)...seems once we got the frogs off their boats, they were absolutely worthless as soldiers, even then.

"If that were the case, we'd have to respect the Chinese from about 1945 until the collapse of the Soviet Union...they harrassed the russkies more than we EVER did...but we were fighting chinese almost as much as koreans during the korean conflict, and they supplied arms and training all through 'Nam to the VC and NVA...not to mention their backing of the Khemer Rouge(sp?) and several other "revolutions" in the far east."

 

exactly my point

blocky']i read it

you might want to change the title of the thread to something more interesting

I doubt they're gonna care about this snog, people hate canada since they hate france and canada is 1/13th french

Canada had a real army in WWI, too, but nobody cares

interesting though

 

RI

FL DIE BLACKY CANADIAN